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You are now listening to True Murder The most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them Geesy Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Good evening. What's scarier than a murderer? Someone with the charisma that compel others to kill for them or to kill themselves. Eat these cult leaders and get an inside
look at their beliefs and how they controlled others. Some cults led by leaders like Charlie Manson, Jim Jones, and David Koresh are notorious, but others are less well known, such as Shoko Ashihara and his doomsday cult Amshimriko, who orchestrated the seren gas attack on the Tokyo Subway, or Joseph di Mambro and Luke Jerray, who founded the Order of the Solar Temple, a doomsday cult that led to the death of fifty one members by murder or suicide.
Then there is Marshall Applewhite, leader of Heaven's Gate, who, along with thirty eight followers, killed themselves in the belief that the hail Bop comets signaled the arrival of a spaceship that would transport them to a higher plane of existence. What makes cult leaders so compelling is their often unfathomable power over their adherents. Why do people kill others or
themselves for a questionable set of beliefs? Tells the stories behind both famous and unfamiliar cults and the people behind them. Across a series of profiles, we learn the jow dropping truth behind some of the most mystifying and deadly cults and their leaders, all of whom led their followers down the dark path. The book that were featuring this evening is Killer Cults, Stories of Charisma, Deceit and Death with my special guest journalists and authors Joyce and Steven Singular.
Welcome back to the program, and thank you so much for this interview. Hi, thanks back, Thank you so much. It's a real it's always a great pleasure to have you both on talking about this latest book, Killer Cults. Let's just talk about what is contained in this The stories that we mentioned that both familiar and not so familiar. Can you tell us what some of the chapters are in this book? Nineteen of them?
In all right, Well, we start with Keith Rainier, who's become quite well known and notorious with his Anxiom cult that has had emerged in the last decade, and he'd gone to trial in New York and been convicted and received a lengthy sentence. That story brought in several celebrity celebrities. There were one was the Alison Mack who was a TV actress, and then there was an heir to the Seagram's fortune, Sarah Brownfman. So that we lead off with that,
we go to an obscure cult called the Slavonians. I particularly thought this was very fascinating because there's a tendency to believe that maybe cults only draw in uneducated people, people who aren't worldly, people who don't have many resources. But this was a cult found that on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the in the seventies, and it was filled with very intelligent, very worldly people, people with resources who were drawn into the idea basically the
fundamental ideas, how do we make better human beings? Basically through psychoanalysis heavy and in that and in.
That particular cult. Even Judy Collins, the singer, was a member for a while. So that's what we found fascinating
about and we had them. We asked the publishing house to specifically put the Sulavanians right next to the next cult that we profiled, a Magdalena Solise, a woman cult leader in Mexico, because, as Steve said, we found it fascinating from a psychological point of view that very well educated people with resources from all socioeconomic groups would join cults and to be, you know, and to be totally on the opposite side, like in Magdalena Solis and you're
b Buena, Mexico in the sixties. These people were very insular, isolated in a little mountain town in Mexico, uneducated, very very poor. So we found, you know that across the board, people from all walks of life have been pulled into cults throughout the history of the human race, apparently.
Right, and it's always what hits the deepest emotional needs, and a number of the ones that we'll be talking about, there's this idea of improving the human race. That's one of the themes that runs through a lot of it. How to make people better how to deal with issues like racism or poverty and things like that. So in numerous cases they start out with high ideals and they certainly don't end that way. The next one is Bogwan Rajnie fascinating story that unfolded in the seventies and eighties
in Oregon. Raich was a spiritual leader in India and he ran into some trouble there and decided to come to the American West and bring his flock with him
and start over. And again it appeared that they had good motives at least at one time, but he sort of descended into somebody who wanted to have one hundred rolls royce, a million dollar watch, all kinds of things as he sent out his minions to do some really nefarious things like trying to take over some towns through voting roles by poisoning some of the local populations so those people wouldn't be around to vote.
And that particular story was very well documented in a Netflix documentary called Wild Wild Country, which I would highly recommend, just to see the depths to which these people went to control their group and then others around them, and to control the voting block in the towns that they started occupying.
And again it was basically a woman who was running this my name mas Sheila Brasny sort of backed off and just lived this life of splendor or took a vow of silence. But there were several very powerful women who basically took over this cult and and did a lot of the activities that we're talking about. The next
one was Joseph de Maambre and Luxerie. As you mentioned, Dan, they they decided to recreate the Cellar Temple in modern times, and again it started out with sort of New Age ideas and maybe New Age ideals.
Well it actually, I thought, started out with some occult types of stories, like based on Rosicrucians and the Knights Templar. That's another aspect we found very you know, compelling about writing about all these different types of cults is that it spanned from you know, offshoots of Christianity to Satanic cults and New Age cults and occult cults, you know, and it just there was just no you know, set group that it seemed to prey upon. It infiltrates into all aspects of religious.
Beliefs, right right. The next one is one people have heard about Jim Jones, the People's Temple. Again, what I found fascinating about Jones is that he started out in the Midwest, I believe, in Indiana, and he was very committed to civil rights, to racial equality, to to you know, really some social ideals, and he wanted to do good in the world. He eventually moved to California and started
recruiting members to his People's Temple. And that the strain that you sort of find here is that once people start to accumulate power, it has a very it often has a very corrosive and debilitating effect, and with him, that's certainly true.
And I've also found that, you know, even though we profiled some of these very well known cults like Jim Jones and the People's Temple and Charles Manson and the Branch Division, I found in doing the research that we uncovered details that I had never really gone deeply into. I mean, you know, when you heard the accounts of these crimes being committed at the time, he mostly I think most people just saw what was on television or they heard on the media. But as we looked closer,
it was interesting to find. And what we've always been interested in where religion intersects with violence. I mean, three of the books that we've worked on have been primarily that the BTK serial Killer, the Doctor Tiller assassination, Jennifer Reality, a woman in Colorado Springs that was coerced by her lover to kill his wife based on you know that she would be forgiven and redeemed if she just embraced Christianity.
We've always found that particular. Oh in Emmy alan Berg book, right, yeah, that one too, so so we've always found that an interesting area to explore. And with the Jim Jones people temple. An interesting fact on that one was that the congressman that went that was murdered in on the on the airstrip in Guyana when they went down to investigate, based on the people in his district telling them that their relatives were complaining about the living conditions down that Can
you remember his name, Steve? We always forget that. Well. The interesting thing about that was that his aid was Jackie Spear, who was shot multiple times and now she is a congressman congresswoman from California, and she has spoken publicly about you know, what that was like to be on that airstrip when they were when they were attacked and ambushed by the followers of Jim Jones. Oh le O'Ryan that was a.
Name, and again it just shows the power that Jones head over these people. One of the things that struck me, which I didn't know before writing this, was that he had, i think three times previous to the actual mass suicide that occurred in nineteen seventy eight, he had asked his followers, which were about a thousand down there, to drink something, you know, drink a concoction which he said was poison, just to see if they would actually drink the thing.
And it wasn't poison, but every time he asked, they actually went ahead and drank it. So he had a pretty good idea that, you know, that when the time came to actually conduct the mass suicide, they would do that. So again, a lot of these people held high ideals, a lot of them were educated, but they had this, you know, profound weakness and this desire to follow a leader who was going to give them absolute answer.
And in many cases a charismatic leader.
Yep, yeah, yeah. He was an interesting looking man. You know, he had the swoop of dark and well.
Spoken, spoke like a preacher, you know, had that ability to draw people in. We also found that as a parallel with some of the serial killers that we've written about, like John Robinson, the man who entombed his victims in fifty five gallon barrel drum barrels outside of Kansas City. They just had an ability to be a real fast talker, think fast on their feet, to know how to charm people, to disarm people.
Yeah, if I were naming a quality of a cult leader or trying to identify when in particular, it's somebody who can get people who've never engaged in criminal behavior, people who would shun criminal behavior in most circumstances, to commit crimes that they're behist I mean, they have that ability to in case after case, they don't actually commit the crimes, but they get seemingly you know, normal people to do that.
And they also get people to turn over their financial resources and to associate themselves with their family, their core unit, family unit. That seems to be one of the driving principles with a lot of these cult leaders that we discovered.
And they also tried basically to take over their sex lives or their sexuality in certain cases by determining who can sleep with whom, who can marry home, you know, who should have sex and at what time and in what circumstances. So I mean they go for the most animate and vulnerable parts of people, their resources, their family, and their sexuality.
But then continuing down the list, then the next person on the list was James Arthur Ray, who was a self help guru and he was featured in the book
The Secret, which became huge bestseller worldwide. And interesting thing about him was that, you know, he was touted on both the Ellen de Generes Show and Oprah Winfrey, of course that they didn't know at the time that you know, what he was doing would lead to three people deaths outside of Sedona, Arizona, in a kind of a Native American sweat live ceremony.
Yeah.
Yeah, So he brought people there. It cost a lot of money to go. He had some prior problems with trying to put people in extreme circumstances to see if they could endure them, apparently as a way of building their character, their endurance. And he had these people go into a tent in Arizona and very hot at a very hot time that the space inside the tent got up to one hundred and twenty two degrees. People were gasping for air, begging to get out, and he, you know,
essentially said they needed to go in. He was convicted, not on murder but on lesser charges and served a couple of years.
I think it was. Yeah, but the thing isn't that he got out and now he's trying to reinvent himself again.
Right, But again, these people were not unsophisticated at all. You know, they were just willing to do whatever he said, you know, right up to the point costing them their lives.
So one of the common threads though, is as well as is offering these people this incredible advantage with whatever the philosophy of the cult is as well. When you mentioned James up the ray, I just had to mention as well that he had the endorsement of people like Oprah Winfrey, and so it's not It seems that one of the common threads is that it's easier to attract a celebrity, and then a lot of that recruiting is done because of the celebrity itself.
That's definitely true in this case. You know, he again, he was charismatic, he was good looking, he was successful. He had the backing of those celebrities and again, people, I mean, if there's any you know lesson here that runs through so many of them. I mean, at some point you have to listen to yourself. You know, you can't away your personal power to somebody who's charismatic once they crossed that line into very questionable or even criminal behavior.
And he, you know, again, he had something of a track record of putting people in dangerous circumstance.
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Every details and you know, ending up in a tragic situation. So yeah, I mean you you have to pick your guru very carefully.
And then the next man on the list is a man from Japan named Shoko Asahara. He grew up in Japan in a small village, started out selling Chinese medicine, but he was eventually arrested for peddling fake drugs. Then he traveled to Tibet and to Paul where he claimed that he achieved enlightenment by studying Buddhism and Hinduism. He went back to Japan and he formed a group called the almshin Rico and I hopeing I'm not mangling that name,
but where he combined Eastern philosophy with apocalyptic teachings. And this is another thread that we've found through many of these cults, this apocalyptic end of times, using that tactic to scare people and to say, you know, this is when the this is where we're going to ascend into heaven, or this is when the rapture is going to occur, or this is when the great earthquake in California is
going to occur. And that was part of the driving force as we were leading up to the year two thousand and to twenty twelve, when the Mind prophecy and when the Mind Calendar supposedly ended, a lot of groups were built up on that foundation and that fear.
Yeah. Yeah, especially the end of the millennium, that that's the theme that runs through through much of this. Yeah.
And with that, Shoko Asahara he is the one that his followers at least saren nerve gas in the subway in Tokyo. And and was what I found interesting about him was that he had recruited again very educated chemists and engineers and journalists and I mean people in the legal system, telecommunications people that worked for that join that group, at work for IBM in Japan, Toshiba, Hitachi, other major companies. They gave thousands and thousands of dollars to his organization.
Yeah, and his plan in putting the nerve gas in there was to kill thousands of people. That didn't turn out that way. It was a much much smaller figure, but the plan was for absolute mass destruction and it was probably the biggest, well it was the biggest sort of mass potential mass destruction event in Japan since the end of World War two, and people were very, very shaken by it.
Yeah. And besides, you know, sexual manipulation. He subjected his followers to sleep in, food deprivation, sensory deprivation hallucinogens to induce visions. We saw that in other sects and cults exerting mind control. Sometimes people were allowed to leave the sect, but only after they had agreed to turn over their property to him, and the sum that refused to disappeared or died.
Now yeah, yeah, so he, he and a handful of his followers, I think about six or seven were eventually executed. It took a long time to go through the Japanese legal system, but when I.
Believe was eight years.
The child dire lasted eight years and he pretended or actually been saying at that point, yeah, just talked a lot of gibberish in the court.
I think they executed him by hanging on in July of twenty eighteen.
Yeah, they hung all of them, so that it wasn't legally resolved until very recently. So to.
At the same time, it's it's interesting that at one time Japan, Japanese government considered his this sect a religion. So it's interesting to go from legitimacy to outright you know, being executed is interesting to say the least, and.
Also interesting, well maybe you know, maybe pretty understandable that absolute power, you know, just pollutes. Absolutely, it when when somebody is given that much control and that many resources they can they start to get corrupted, especially if they had any any bit of sociopathic or narcissistic psychopathic tendencies to begin with.
But again, you think about sending you know, sending people out to poison their fellow citizens, and people you know, being willing to do that just to follow the orders and go and you know, create the circumstances that could have been far worse than they were.
Absolutely amazing to me that, you know, his net worth jumped to like four point three million to one billion dollars six years later. He had people throughout the world, Russia, New York, you know, all over Japan. It's incredible that he got he had that many followers at one time.
Right, and that people, I mean, there's just been this hunger running through all of these stories of people to find somebody who can give them absolute answers to what really are life's mysteries. I mean, if if that's the hook, also, I don't have to think for myself. I don't have to solve these problems. In many cases, I don't have to earn a living and make money or.
Maybe their family life wasn't that great, so they wanted to join up with a better family, a larger purpose.
Right. We interviewed someone who was in the Reverend Moon organization, and he didn't participate in any criminal behavior or anything, but that's basically what he said. You know, he was looking for a family and this at that time was the best alternative for him until Reverend Moon decided to decide to pick who he would marry, and that was sort of the thing that pushed him out.
I really like his quote. He was in there for twelve years, and he said, I felt myself that loose ends. I had a deep longing for connection, for overriding spirituality. I gave myself completely to this extended nuclear family. We wanted to make a better world. If I trusted in God, it gave myself completely to it. What could go wrong? I just thought that was really a pivotal quote to put at the very beginning of the book.
Yeah, definitely, it's a mindset that runs through much of this. The next Colt was it was in Massachusetts a fall river, just called the Fall River Colt. I thought it was really really interesting. It's it's one of the shorter entries in the book. But it was basically just this group of criminals sort of the underbelly of Fall River.
Who Tempson prostitutes, who.
Got into well what was called the Satanic called and then created what was locally known as the Satanic Panic, where people were disappearing and being mutilated out in the woods and things like that. But it's you know, we researched the story, wrote the story. When you get to the end of it, you won't. I for one didn't know exactly what happened because they were all blaming each other for doing this, and.
Some of them are scented their original statements. But I believe they are making a movie of that one or have made it. I believe it be called Satanic Panic actually.
Right, right, But in terms of criminal I mean again, these these people were involved in criminal behavior, and it's fun to me. It's one of the most colorful and compelling and interesting of the entries in the anthology.
And then the next one is of course Charles Manson, which everybody has heard so much about. So what what what I found interesting on that was some of these little details where we really had to dive deep, and I didn't realize I mean I was, I miss, I must have been about seventh grade when that crime occurred, and it was sort of the end of the you know, the free love hippie the benevolent type of hippie movement. That crime to kind of stop all that, and that
this darker side emerged. But I didn't remember, and I had read you know, Victor Bugliosi's seminal book on it, Helter Skelter, years ago, but I didn't realize that the group had not only targeted you know, who they thought was Terry Melker, Doris Day's son who lived in the house that Sharon Tate and Roman Polonsky had rented, but they had also had on our death list of celebrities people like Richard Burton, Steve McQueen, Tom Jones, Elizabeth Taylor,
Frank Sinatra. Those little details that where we really had to dive deep into the story I found fascinating.
Yeah. Well, yeah, the demonic nature of Charles Manson, I think really comes through in this piece. And I mean he was somebody who sort of fits the standard profile the psychopath, you know, damage at a very early age, sort of cast aside.
In many ways, institutional life.
Goes in and out of prison very very often, and he sort of, you know, he sort of comes out there number of stories in this anthology that dovetail kind of with the nineteen sixties and all that he wanted to, you know, write songs and get in the music business and sort of ride the way of all of those things. And you know, he tried to do that, but he kept getting robust in that world as well. He wasn't that talented, and you know, he just descends further and further into criminal madness.
And again prayed on young you know, just people that were on the street, that were doing drugs, that were disenfranchised. Those were his targets. And that's where a lot of not all of these cult members, but a lot of them, that's who they would pray on. People like that that they could tell we're looking for something or needed some something larger to belong to, right.
Right.
The next one is a fairly unwell known one, Aldolfo Constanzo, who grew up in Florida, I believe in Miami and where in the drug trade there was becoming very very intense.
During the time of what's that Farco.
Yes, he'd sort of studied Pablo Escobar's reign of terror in Colombia. It's estimated that Escobar may have been responsible for about five thousand deaths. And this guy sort of studied that looked at it. He also, with his mother, I believe, had gotten into Santa Ria, which is a form of religion and kind of like voodoo. Yeah, kind of like voodoo. And so he eventually gravitated into the dread world himself, recruited people.
But he partnered up with this young woman named Sarah Aldrete. And she is interesting because she was a model student. She was, you know, successful, and she became president of her soccer booster club and she'd received the National Collegiate Health Physical Award. But she also had this fascination with the dark arts and black magic, and that came up when she took up with this constanzo and then she devoted herself to his cause. So again, this is another
interesting aspect of studying these cults. In some instances, it takes two people to form this other entity that will actually take you carry out these types of crimes, whereas maybe one or the other alone would not have ever done that, but the two together form a different entity where they can feed off each other and sort of like Cleebold and Harris.
Did Cree Bold and Harris and Dick Hickock and Perry Smith and then cold Blood. You thought Dick Hitcock was the really bad guy with the criminal you know mind and the plans, but Perry ends up being being the killer. You know, bad chemistry. In the Aldolpho Constanzo case, I mean, one of the things I found interesting was that they they were they had property in Mexico where they were doing a lot of drug deals and other criminal activities, and they were killing people and chopping them up and
marrying them and all of that. But one night an American, a young American man was there and crossed the border from Texas in New Mexico looking for some sort of action probably and ends up dead. And it was that killing of the American that set off the investigation. I mean, something you find, you know in other stories as well. When you kill an American citizen or somebody in the government, the EAFBI, any of that, it ups the ante for
an investigation by a lot. And that sort of unleashed the authorities on Alfonso and on Sarah Aldrete, and that's what brought them down, so he was he.
Was later killed or he killed himself or had someone killed. But she was sentenced to thirty years in jail.
Right right. She tried to sort of wiggle out of her responsibility in the case, but it didn't work. So it's again, it's a fascinating tale that most people don't know that much.
Yeah, the ones in Mexico, like Magdalena Solis in this one I found fascinating.
Ido. Yeah, I thought they were very interesting. The next one is something again people have probably heard of Marshall Applewhite and Heavenskgate in nineteen ninety seven. Again, they thought that they were Their purpose was to really ascend to a higher plane of existence from what we have on Earth.
And they had talked about this and planned this for a long long time, and they took as a sign that when the Hall Bob comet passed by the Earth, and I believe in the spring of ninety seven, there would be a spaceship behind it, and that spaceship would would whisk them away into this other dimension. So again, these were not unsophisticated people at all. They were very much ahead of the curve in terms of computer technology and the early work on the Internet, and they were
in the mid nineties. They were putting out in for me about their belief system and what they thought was going to happen, and recruiting people to their cause and bringing in money and all of those things. They moved to them very wealthy suburb in southern California, Rancho to Santa Fe, and Rancho Santa Fe, and then you know, in April of ninety seven they laid their final plans.
The onset of the Internet has been an interesting factor also in some of these cults because the ability to recruit grew exponentially once they were able to go online and reach vast, vast numbers of possible recruitinges.
Right, So they finally decided again in April ninety seven to have their last meal at Marie Calendar's restaurant. They all ate the same thing, I.
Think, and then they all dressed in the same clothing.
They're all dressed in the same clothing. They put like five dollars in their pockets, five cents, right, so that they could have transit fair to the next place they were going, and they took a concoction and you know, when the somebody came by the house and of course, the smell had gotten very bad. I believe there were thirty nine bodies laid out in their dark clothing with their tennis shoes on and their veils over their faces. And it was a I mean, it was a shocking,
shocking story. I believe that President Clinton even talked about it at a national level. Yeah, he did so. Again, it tied into the new millennium coming only three years away. The apocalypse was at hand. You know, there's a better existence out there somewhere, and if you just follow me and take your life, we'll find it. Extraordinary message that people would be willing to follow.
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Now? Joyce and Steven you were talking about Marshall Applewhite and Heaven's Gate and talking about also it's incredible the things that people will do. We talked about the Aldolfo Constanzo and the Human Sacrifice cult and what those people were capable of doing, ripping out hearts and other organs and dismemberment. And then the Marshall Applewhite. He had castrated himself and then convinced members other members that they should cast themselves as well.
Yeah, that up because Steve and I were discussing that yesterday and I said, you know, in the in the research, we couldn't find if, hopefully presumably he went to a medical facility to have that done. I don't know how when could do that to himself. Yeah, because he was unable to stifle his sexual urges.
Well, he was also deeply conflicted about being gay or not gay. And he married this woman. As joy saluted to earlier, she sort of the two of them together, you know, began to lay these you know, great plans about their transit into the next into the next realm. But again it sort of took the combination of people to get it off the ground, right.
And also all these cases do there there's a combination of things where there's a confluence events in sort of like you say that it's the turn of the Millennium or the Hail Bob Comet or just unrest in society in the late sixties. That is part of the allure or feeds into the allure anyway, right.
And you know, if you think about some of those decades, I mean one of the things that you know, they were known for is somewhat the disintegration of the nuclear family. I mean, people were getting a lot more divorces, kids were growing up maybe much more without two parents. I mean, all of that slow unraveling of the fabric was going on. You have kids who you know, are maybe at loose
ends and looking for something. I mean, there are examples here where you know, people start coffeehouses with a religious undertone and start drawing them in again through the music of the sixties and things like that. And you know, I was around the situation like that myself once, and I could see how vulnerable people were and how much they were looking to a leader.
You mean about that minister in your small town, right was, but then they're in young men he.
Was then, but then he went to a much more populated area in New Jersey, just outside of New York City, and you kind of thought, well, these people are more sophisticated, but they weren't, you know, they were looking for someone to basically show them the way. And again it may be redundant, but to me, it's just one of these themes of not sort of being willing to take responsibility for your life, figure out who you are, find your own answers, take your own steps, being willing to sort
of do that for yourself. It's the absolute common theme of all of this. If you just hand over that personal power, you know your life will get better. It's a very dubious thought, it's a.
Very it was, you know, for us writing the book was not only did we educate ourselves vastly on a lot of these details that we neither one of us remembered or knew about, but we just think it's really a good a good thing to put out there for people to read about so they can see how vulnerable people can be preyed upon and how quickly it can descend into something horrendous and out of spiral, totally out of control, and putting your trust into someone you know, just blindly like that.
Where and all of us, all three of us, are you know, very familiar with researching and writing about criminal behavior, you know, in a cult. And this runs through most of this. You know, you can believe anything you want up to a certain point. You can do anything you want. But when you cross that line into criminal behavior, you know, whatever that is, it not only changes the dynamic of the cult, but it brings in law enforcement. And that's I mean in the Rajenese case, it was it was
really true. For example, they would go into these tiny towns in Oregon and they would make a point of having sex on the lawns of these people, not necessarily a crime. But when you start poisoning their food and people start getting sick and could potentially die, and you cross that line into criminal behavior, that's what brings. That's what brings the rain and some of.
The frustrating things for me anyway, reading about these people is that some of these people died natural deaths. Sheila the one involved with the bugwe shri Ra's niece group in Oregon. She's living in Switzerland right now. She did do a little bit of time here in the States, but not very long. And David Berg, who will talk about a little bit later. He also died at ninety two of natural causes. And you just are it's frustrating to see that some of them actually get away with this right.
And some will be for a long time, which is reassuring.
Yes, tell us about the Chris Korda and the Church of Euthanasia, Like I said, very hard, that's.
A very interesting one. He's still a lot today as well. He was born He was born a man in nineteen sixty two in New York and would later transform into a transgender software developer, slash musician, slash DJ with a deep attachment to the Dottist movement that had started in Europe in nineteen fourteen after the start of World War One. He also is like a multi media artist electronica music, conceptual art. But started a church called the Church of Euthanasia.
And when he was ten, he had read an article in the New York Times about climate change that deeply impacted him. He interpreted it to mean that global warming was irreversible and the human race was doomed unless some sort of radical action was taken immediately. So he be twenty years later when he formed this Church of Euthanasia. It promoted mass suicide.
Right their slug and was saved the planet, kill yourself. So he he went to the great extreme of thinking that the human population needed to be lowered significantly in order for the species to have a chance to survive and the planet, you know, to be healthy as well. So some of it seemed like sort of like theater of the absurd. I mean, the Dadis were known for sort of embracing absurdism in the early twentieth century, and some of it was you know, absurdist theater, but I
think the message behind it was quite serious. So he attracted a certain following. I mean they would go they were, you know, big supporters of abortion, which would you know, be away again of lowering the population, and you know, attended a number of events like that and did some again some absurd theatrics around all of that.
But the church was eventually sued by the parents of children who were considering suicide. And then this Missouri woman was found dead the print out from the church lying next to her. So then a prosecutor in Saint Louis, Missouri threatened the church with voluntary man slaughter charges, and he took down those instructions off of his website.
Yeah yeah, so again it's a very bizarre story. It wasn't known to me before we started. Before me, I wasn't aware of it. So I think people would find it, you know, very entertaining, just to find out the extremes to which this individual went to make a.
Point, and I thought this was interesting about him. The idea for the Church of euth in Asia came to him in a dream, this according to his website, where he was confronted by some alien intelligence known as the Bean, who spoke to for the inhabitants of the Earth and other dimensions. I mean, you know, you can't make this stuff up.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, so that was that was.
He's still alive and well and living in Europe, I believe. Yeah, yeah, he still has a Facebook page up right.
And again just just just to tell listeners, I mean, again, this is an anthology. It is not necessarily something with someone or to read beginning to end, but you can just dip in and find these very fascinating stories. That are. You know, they're four to five thousand word entries and they're easy to you know, to consume. So it's a different type of project than we've ever worked on before. It's not a long narrative story, right.
We purposely interspersed the longer, the longer stories about say like Manson with the shorter ones, just so that it would be easier to read.
Right. The next one, again is a well known one, the David koresh Brands Davidian group. In the early nineteen nineties. They had gotten together on this ranch that should been there. The Branch Davidians had been around for some period of time. David Kresh showed up again. He was charismatic, he had natural leadership abilities, played.
Guitar, kind of a rock star. Looked about him.
Yeah, music runs through. This developed a following and you know, had their own lives there on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas. This is a complicated story and you know, the ultimate truth of it is something people have to decide for themselves. But the federal government showed up there and I believe it was in February of nineteen ninety three, and they were looking into illegal arms on the branch Davidian Ranch.
Well, the ATS thought that they had sold weapons at gun shows and converted semi automatic firearms to automatic without proper permits, which was one of the of the reasons for going to the compound in the first place. So it was an issue originally.
Yes, it was atf and there were four agents that were initially killed, something many people don't know about in gunfire. And then the standoffs started. It would go from February to April nineteenth. On March twelfth, a new Attorney General came into the United States, Janet Reno, and she was, you know, we don't know exactly how well informed she was.
But after March twelfth to April twenty twenty ninth April nineteenth, the negotiations went back and forth, and the authorities were constantly trying to get Korreesh to you know, stop, to standoff, let the children go, whatever they could negotiate with them.
And you know, I thought one of the interesting I'm sorry to interrupt you, but one of the interesting aspects of that during the fifty one day standoff that I had never heard before until I had to do this dive into the research was that the agents had put up spotlights around the property with giant speakers that broadcast around the clock different things like Tibetan monks chanting, telephones, ringing Christmas carols, the sound of rabbits being killed, Nancy
Sinatra singing these boots are made for walking reavely. Yeah, all of it making it harder and harder for the followers of Koresh to get any sleep. That was an interesting tactic I had never heard about. Right.
So eventually, on that morning of April nineteen, nineteen ninety three, the federal government made the decision to shoot gas into the compound and you know, try to flush these people out. There were It's included in our story that you know, there were people in the religious community, I mean scholars and people with knowledge that said, you know, the government doesn't really understand what Koresh believes and what these people are doing, and you don't have to push you to
this extreme. I mean, they have the right to practice their religion under the First Amendment. And so that argument was made, the government decided to go in. What we think happened is that then Koresh or the followers set fires and that caused the conflagration that ended up with I believe seventy six or seventy seven people dead, including twenty five shows.
Well, they actually had a report filed by a man named Dan Worth whose conclusion was that the Koresh followers had actually started the fire. Yes, even though you know, the FBI and Jennerino later said that it is possible that some of the weapons that they shot in could have ignited something. So there always will be That's where you have to make up your own mind, I suppose.
Yeah, And Jennerina and Bill Clinton both said later on they were somewhat of a mea culpa and saying, you know, if we had it to do over, we might do differently.
Yeah.
So that went on for years. There were congressional investigations and other things. But I mean, obviously an overwhelming tragedy.
There, and with all the children, all those poor children that got killed.
Yeah, horrible And another story we'll get too later. I mean, this cloud of Waco has hung over a number of other situations where the federal government does not quite know what to do when when there's a standoff or people armed, do they have bombs? Are they going to blow themselves?
Right?
And the damage to the government's credibility at that point, at least in some people's eyes, had already been done well, because now there's reports of a growing militia movement spreading across the country, and part of what happened in part because of what happened at Waco.
Yeah, two years later to the day Tennessee, they went to Oklahoma City with his truck full of explosives, very much making the point that it was the same day, just two years later, and blowing up the Alfred Mara Building in Oklahoma City and killing one hundred and sixty eight men, women and children. So the repercussions of this have rolled out. I mean, Koresh has been seen as sort of a religious or right wing martyr ever since.
And because Timothy McVay had studied this white supremacist novel, The Turner Diaries, which is about it's a fictional account of a revolutionary named Earl Turner who blows up a federal building, you know.
I mean, will that one that's.
Going to tie into later another.
So there are some cross ties here and in some of these stories. The next one is again it wasn't that well known to me. David Berg and the Children of God, and this one released, from my point of view, just seems like somebody who is a sex criminal and just decided to get into the business of you know, salvation and religion and trying to offer people, you know, answers to the impending apocalypse.
Well, he found his little niche there in the counterculture movement in southern California in nineteen sixty eight, and he was he gained notoriety for incorporating sexuality into his spiritual message and recruitment methods. So, you know, what was interesting to me about him was that he hit upon this idea to allure young people who said they were ready for his Christian message. He opens a coffee shop, he brings in rock music, He hands out free peanut butter sandwiches.
You know, his timing was good because those activities were coinciding with the hippie movement, and you know, and the music thing really was one of his inroads. Guitars and evangelism. Evangelism were gaining ground at that time, so he capitalized on that, on that growing communal lifestyle, and he began to dress the part, you know, began to dress so that he looked so that the young people could relate to him.
Right right, big set. You know examples as with him, you know, dressing to look like what the image of Jesus we've been given is. You know, whether that's accurate or not, you know, the long hair, the robes and all of that. Now, two very well known people, Walking and River Phoenix. The actors their parents were drawn into this and Rose mc and well, they were young and they were exposed to some of these ideas and activities.
River Phoenix, as most people know, an incredibly promising young actor, killed himself in the early in his early twenties, and his brother Jouquen you know, and interviews, has talked about thinking that maybe some of this influence you know on him was very bad from a young age. So so again death has attached itself to this group. David Berg was very outspoken about you know, having sex with everybody at all times. You know, that was his idea of revolution.
That really really really disturbing to me. Particularly this cult disturbed me the most because they were having sex with young children and promoting sex with young children, boys and girls. And he would have his followers, some of the young women, he would have him go to bars and he used this technique called flirty fishing, where they would go to bars and try to get men at the bar to sleep with them and then recruit them into the group or or at least take their money so that they
could you know, finance the group. And that was another cult that made just incredible amounts of money so that he could sustain this lifestyle. He lived in a seclusion apart from his followers, who you know here he was espousing this humble lifestyle for his followers. But he lives in a nice home with a swimming pool, you know.
Yeah, So he ended up in Europe, I believe Joyce said, away from the legal troubles.
Yeah, exactly. That's how he escaped his legal troubles here in the States and died peacefully at age ninety two.
The next one in the book is a man named Bob Matthews. I have written about Bob Matthews starting about thirty five years ago with the assassination of the talk show host in Denver named Alan Berg. But I thought that Matthews and his group The Order were again sort
of a classic example of a criminal cult. They had studied this book that we referred to earlier called The Turner Diaries, which is about a white power revolution that sweeps across America and gets rid of my minorities, gay people, feminist liberal judges, etc. And Matthews was bold enough to think, let's take this novel and use it as an actual blueprint for real activity. Let's start assassinating people and eliminating minorities.
They did commit two hundred and forty crimes. They did steal something in the neighborhood of four and a half million dollars, and they did come to Denver and assassinate Alan Berg. Again. He had recruited it among the sort of dispossessed, you know, white working class men. Some of them were Vietnam veterans. They were very disaffected, they were very angry, and but they had many of them had never committed or contemplated criminal behavior, and he got them
to cross that line into very serious criminal behavior. So he is considered something of a At the end of nineteen ninety four he died in a shootout with the FBI. It would be Island up near Seattle, and he is considered something of a godfather of the right white nationalist movement that we see today. They refer to his activities, his attempt to bring down the government and the society and the crimes that he committed. So his thread runs
right into the present. If you go onto the far right websites you'll see that.
Well.
Yeah, so the next one is again from my perspective, not well known Jiangyan Suuk with a cult named Providence, and again he I mean, he was something of a spin off from the Moon organizationication Offication church, and I in my view reading about him, he again sort of fell into the category of somebody who was a sex criminal and just sort of used all of these other tools religion, you know, the impending doom, et cetera to satisfy himself sexually.
Yeah.
Absolutely, you know he was so eventually, as as happens in case after case, you know, somebody eventually comes forward and blows the whistle on these people or civilians do it who are outside the group, as in this case happened, and he is eventually brought down. So the story of Orange Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints is the
next to the last entry in the book. Many people are probably familiar with Warren Jeffs by now, but it's something that we had researched starting in two thousand and six. The book When Men Become Gods about the subject came out in two thousand and eight.
And when we went down, we drove down to the compound on the border of Arizona and Utah called Colorado City where Warren Jeffs and his followers lived and at the time, Warrang Jeffs was on the FBI's ten most wanted list, And it was rather it was a little bit nerve wracked game driving around that town because at that point in time, people didn't know if they have the FLDS. The fundamentalist Latter Day Safe had stockpiled munitions on the edge of town, much like Waco. They we
you know, the authorities were nervous to go in. They didn't know if there was going to be a conflagration or you know, mass suicide or what was going to happen. When we were investigating that particular story.
What struck me about this story, and again you might think, well, these people were isolated and you know, uneducated or whatever. I found many of the people who had been thrown out of the FLDS bywar and Jest to be quite intelligent, quite long form before they had all forms of media. They had the Internet. He took over in the early two thousands, so they had all of that technology. But he did things that, to my knowledge, no one else did.
And the people that we wrote about, such as he would take men and tell them you've sinned against the Church or you've sinned against me. So what you need to do is go away and repent for your sins. Go away to Saint George and nearby town or some other town, write down all your sins, stay away, and tell I tell you to come back. While they were gone, he would take They all had multiple wives. I mean,
they might have twenty wives and forty children. He would take their wives and their children and just disperse them among other men who were in his favor, just give their kids away. I mean. And it was extraordinary to me that these hard working, you know, decent right people would just go along with this until they realized that he was a monstrosity and.
They I have to make a point here about Warren Jeffson. The FLDS. Similar to people that were born into cults, like say the children of got David Berg. Some people are actually born into cults. They don't know, anything else until maybe they're to start thinking for themselves or like as we found in the instances of the Warren Jeff's case, there are always people that are renegades. There are always people that will chafe at the bit and push back about,
you know, against authoritarianism. And that's what happened in the Warren Jeff's case. These women stood up against him, and when some of the men failed, these women stood up. They went to court and eventually helped bring him down.
Yes, eventually got the state of Arizona to investigate him, and that led to bringing in the FBI. All of the women that the joyce they're referring to had been forced into young marriages, you know, arranged marriages, and finally they just hit a place where they said, we're going to fight back.
And in many cases, you know, marriage to men that are quite older than them, where men in their seventies or eighties, you know, and they're like maybe fourteen or sixteen, you know.
Yeah, And Jeff eventually picked up when he was on the FBI ten most wanted this. He went to trial in Utah in two thousand and seven and was convicted on two rape charges or accomplished the rape. That verdict
was overturned. But then the most probably the most spectacular part of the story is that he had built this huge white limestone temple in Texas and started moving all of his people there when the heat got too much in Arizona and Utah, and eventually there was a raid on that compound and they found that he was marrying eleven year olds or twelve year olds, and the evidence was there, and he went to trial in Texas and
got what is essentially a life sentence. So he has been brought down and has paid the price.
But there are tendrils of that sect that are still in operation in Canada, in southern Colorado and other parts of the country. Again, they like to move into places that are isolated, insular where they can hopefully infiltrate the local politics, so they can kind of have some control in that regard.
Yeah, and he has still tried to lead people from his selle in Texas, but his hold is far less than it once was.
And then finally, this is when you know, the publishing company asked us to do most of those people on the list, and we offered a few suggestions of our own, but we We really wanted to end with this cult of Columbine because we thought this is one that's current, it's ongoing, and this is young people who have supported,
you know, the shooters in the Columbine case. Cleebold and Harris saw them as martyrs and started emulating them and trying to outdo them or trying to, you know, replicate what they did in several schools that they were involved in.
Right and again, the rise of the internet has been I mean, anyone, any young person who wants to access, for example, the tapes that Harrison Creebole made leading right up to their crimes. Those things are out there. If the authorities had a lot of mixed feelings about releasing some of this material, but ultimately they did, and other people around the country have studied it and taking these
guys on as their role models. We provide numerous examples of people who were planning to do some sort of mass killing. In some cases it didn't come off because I think the authorities have gotten better at detecting these things and stopping them.
Not only the authorities, but people are beginning to see the warning size and taking it seriously. When their classmates are people they know are making statements on social media or exhibiting some kind of strange behavior and they're actually seeing something insane, something thankfully right.
Right. So again it's this idea, you know, are you willing to sacrifice your life for either something or someone that you believe in? An example after example in these cults, people are willing to do that.
It's interesting in these cases not that they all share the same characteristics, but many of the stories they share the same kinds of characteristics in terms of how they were lured into these cults and then made to do things like give up your property, give up secrets that to be able to stay in the cult, personal success, peace of mind, supernatural powers, higher power for the people
in the cult. It's incredible all of these similar characteristics to lure some of these same people, same types of people into these groups.
Yes, absolutely, and again throwing in you know, the end of the second millennium, the arrival of the new millennium. If we all remember the Y two K scare, I mean that went through the general population. You know, the computer world is going to crash, you have to thoctpile food. I mean that was a pretty common idea, and these people just took it to the next two or three levels.
Yeah. Absolutely. I want to thank you very much Joyce and Stephen for coming on and talking about killer Cults, Stories of Charisma, deceit and death. For those that might want to check this out, is there facebook page a website tell us about.
Our website is www dot stevensingular dot com and that's Stephen st e p h E N s I N g U l a r dot com. We always update that dan so that people can see when things are coming out, or when there's going to be television appearances or you know, podcasts, anything, any developments we always put on the website.
Great well, thank you very much. It's been an absolute pleasure. Killer Cults, Stories of Charisma, deceit and Death. Thank you very much for having bye, Thank you, good night.